The Influence of Public Transport Delays on Mobility on Demand Services

Abstract

Demand for different modes of transportation clearly interacts. If public transit is delayed or out of service, customers might use mobility on demand (MoD), including taxi and carsharing for their trip, or discard the trip altogether, including a first and last mile that might otherwise be covered by MoD. For operators of taxi and carsharing services, as well as dispatching agencies, understanding increasing demand, and changing demand patterns due to outages and delays is important, as a more precise demand prediction allows for them to more profitably operate. For public authorities, it is paramount to understand this interaction when regulating transportation services. We investigate the interaction between public transit delays and demand for carsharing and taxi, as measured by the fraction of demand variance that can be explained by delays and the changing OD-patterns. A descriptive analysis of the public transit data set yields that delays and MoD demand both highly depend on the weekday and time of day, as well as the location within the city, and that delays in the city and in consecutive time intervals are correlated. Thus, demand variations must by corrected for these external influences. We find that demand for taxi and carsharing increases if the delay of public transit increases and this effect is stronger for taxi. Delays can explain at least 4.1% (carsharing) and 18.8% (taxi) of the demand variance, which is a good result when considering that other influencing factors, such as time of day or weather exert stronger influences. Further, planned public transit outages significantly change OD-patterns of taxi and carsharing.